Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote (ATOM Study Guide)

Women in the western world in the nineteenth century had virtually no rights. Once they married they signed over everything to their husbands (including their children). If the marriage turned abusive it was almost impossible to escape. And even worse was the fate of 'fallen women' as unmarried mothers were called.

How is it that a western woman today can enjoy exceptional freedom, power and privilege, when little over 100 years ago women were subjected to such entrenched political, legal, economic and social disadvantage?

A key was the winning of the right to vote and stand for parliament. But where would that be done?

Women in America – the land of the free – couldn't vote until 1920.

Women in Britain – the home of liberty – didn't win full suffrage until 1928.

And women in France – the revolutionary bearer of liberty, equality and fraternity – were denied their political rights until 1944.

But in Australia women had the right to vote in national elections from 1902, second only to New Zealand.

Utopia Girls (Jasmin Tarasin, 2011) tells the story of how Australian women attained political power and influence – in their own country and on the international stage – through the lives of five remarkable and unique women: Caroline Dexter, a London bohemian with a distaste for long dresses; Henrietta Dugdale, an unconventional gold rush emigrant and utopian free-thinker; Louisa Lawson, a bush pioneer who did it tough on the colonial frontier; Mary Lee, an elderly Irish widow with fire in her belly; and Vida Goldstein, a beautiful young city girl from the best of homes who threw caution to the wind to live the most radical of lives.

These women were startlingly different in their family backgrounds, life experiences and personal approaches to politics, but together they would lead a revolution.

With their comrades, they would carry the flag over half a century until a newly federated Australia could claim its title as a uniquely democratic nation. Their tireless, and sometimes thankless, work would take them from the poorest slums to the seats of power in the fledgling nation.

This achievement ushered in the modern era of modernity. Hemlines raised. Family sizes shrunk. Before long, bras were burning, and formerly bluestocking women were reborn as material girls.

This is the situation most women in the Western world take for granted. So much has changed, so relatively quickly, that it's easy to forget how difficult it was to achieve. At a time when Australia's prime minister is an outspoken woman, the idea that women have a voice in our democratic system of government seems so commonplace as to be humdrum. But little over century ago, there was nothing obvious, expected or ordinary about the notion that women might have a say in making the laws that governed them.

What we really need to know is this: why Australia? What was going on in that hotbed of radicalism and idealism at the end of the earth that at long last delivered such progressive liberal reforms?

Historian Dr Clare Wright guides us through this fascinating story, with some of Australia's most prominent actors illuminating the film by reciting from contemporary texts. Beautiful graphic and archive sequences illustrate the story. The result is an evocative and moving film about a vitally important but little-known passage of Australian history.

The truth is, a battle royal was waged between the corseted advocates of change and the staunch defenders of the male prerogative to power. The insurgents won.

Utopia Girls is their story.